Cohorts

Find out when your customers are most likely to churn. 🗓

Written by Erin Carey Updated over a week ago

What are Cohorts?

Cohorts are a great way to segment your customer base and give you more insights into when folks are most likely to churn. This can help you to be more proactive about preventing churn, and monitor whether your efforts have been successful or not. Look at this beautiful, segmented comparison graph!

How do I read a cohort chart?

At first glance, this chart can be pretty overwhelming. So many different shades of blue. Ahh!

Let's break it down to make it a bit easier to understand.

Ah. That's much less overwhelming.

The date (February 2017) is the cohort or segment being represented.

The number to the right of it (44) is the number of folks that signed up that month.

The percentage is the percentage of folks that **are still customers** at the end of that date range. In this case, only 2% of people who signed up in February 2017 churned in their first month (hurrah!).

As you move further to the right, you see what percentage of folks remained as you move further and further from the signup date. In this example, by 11 months from signup, 57% of customers remained!

You can also toggle between Relative (%) and Absolute ($) values at the top right.

Making sense of the data

Finding trends

Cohorts are perfect for seeing trends like when your customers are most likely to churn. The color gradient makes it easy to see where each cohort tends to suffer the biggest loss of customers. Use this information to time check up emails, phone calls, and other retention efforts.

See how your efforts are paying off

Say four months ago you started actively checking in with folks at the 2 month mark in an effort to reduce churn. You can use cohorts to see how effective that has been by seeing if there has been a change in the percentage of users who remain at the 2-3 month mark.